


(i am) rotting meat

by oncewewerezombies



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Gross, Guro, Insects, Rotting, Trypophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 00:44:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5607235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncewewerezombies/pseuds/oncewewerezombies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Any troll, body horror.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <a href="http://vertebraeaker.tumblr.com/post/132760606519/signs-as-gurogore-tropes">These.</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>taurus: trypophobia & parasitic growths of fungus, plants and/or maggots in the hands and eyes</p>
            </blockquote>





	(i am) rotting meat

Tavros can’t remember when it was that Gamzee had brought him here. Everything inside the cavern turns into the same time, becomes nothing, all there is to do is lie where he has put him and listen to the sounds of the insects devouring him from the inside. He can feel their thoughts, little nibbling thoughts of hunger, barely thoughts at all. At least the flesh they are eating their way through is already beyond feeling, he doesn’t know what he would do if he had to feel it as well as ‘hear’ it.

After Vriska had performed her little revengespiral, there hadn’t been. Well. He hadn’t had much of a life. It had started with him trusting her and her using that trust to walk him off a cliff, winding up in his broken body and non-working lower limbs and then. Aradia had. And Vriska. Then _Sollux_.

Aradia.

He didn’t like to think about it.

There’s a lot he doesn’t want to think about.

He’d thought that the worst thing about being tricked into falling off the cliff by Vriska was that his legs didn’t work anymore. And it is, it is one of the worst things. But. He’s found out that connected to that one fact, there can be _even more worse things_. They have led to him lying here, in this cold dark place while Gamzee comes and goes, comes and goes, stays to murmur over him and beg for miracles and then leave again. Gamzee will stroke his face and cry, big purple tears that run down his face and cut tracks across his paint, and then the lanky purpleblood adolescent who he thoughts was his friend walks back out of this desolate mildewing cavern. Walks away, as though Tavros wasn’t begging for him to pick him up and take him with him. The scent of salt and rotting seaweed is past his ability to notice, he’s been here so long. He barely notices the scent of himself anymore. He’s decaying more slowly than the seaweed, but he is rotting into the comfortslab Gamzee laid him on when he brought him down there.

It should have been something that helped him. Telling Gamzee where he lived because Vriska kept making all these comments over Trollian, and Gamzee wouldn’t fall prey to her thinkpan control, he was too high for that, and this should have made him safe. He should have been able to just hang out in Gamzee’s hive and maybe get a little help, and. They could have rapped and stuff, but. He wishes he’d told someone what he was doing but he hadn’t known how to trust anyone else, he was broken and should have been culled on the spot. He really should have let someone do it, maybe, that might have been better than this. 

He can’t feel his grasping fronds all the way to the tips anymore, they are dying in grub leg lengths, all the way up his limbs. The deadness, the numbness is this terrible thing that travels up his snatching struts, he can feel it moving to his bloodpusher and it hurts. Gamzee doesn’t even listen to him anymore. He doesn’t think the other troll can. All he does is weep, as though he’s already dead, even if Gamzee feeds him, cleans him, wipes away the mould that creeps up over his grey skin to turn him into a premature adult black. But he isn’t dead yet, not completely, maybe he could live, if. If Gamzee carried him out of here and into the sunlight.

What he wouldn’t give to see sunlight again.

Tavros has tried begging for the purpleblood who had been so insistent on him being his best Tavbro, his brownblooded brother, his best rapping motherfucker, to just. Get. Karkat. He’s worn his speaking muscle out on it, he’s tried to convince him to do it until his chirpbox was hoarse. Anyone. His wicked Kansis, the best fishbro, wickedest fishsis, blueblooded motherfucker, little cunning catsis, spiderbitch, judging sharp eyed lawsister, beebro. Any of them. Any of their friends. Just one. Just tell them that he was here, that he was alive. Please, that he could be fixed. 

Someone could fix him. He could live.

All he does is lie here and listen to the insects devour him from the inside. He used to move around a little, but when he saw the holes appearing in the wasted limbs below his waist, the little burrows where the larvae had eaten through his skin and muscle so they can breathe and poke their front ends out, he just dropped his head back. He can’t even die. He won’t even die. Gamzee is eking out his life in drips and moments, he is dying shade by shade and he’s rotting apart. He’s being devoured from the inside out and he wishes, he wishes that he hadn’t been saved, that Gamzee hadn’t picked him up and that he’d never let him know where his hive was, maybe he would still be ok if he was back at his hive. Maybe they could have found a way for him to move around, maybe he wouldn’t have needed any help. Maybe he could have found a way to beat the drones. No one ever did, but he could have been the first.

He’s crying again and he brings his limp hand up to wipe his eyes and freezes. Oh. Oh no. It’s been a while since he’s seen his hand, all he does most of the time is just lie there, breathe and listen to the mindless devouring consciousness of the insects but. Oh god. No, this can’t be happening. This can’t. Oh god. Oh. God. His stomach turns over and he wants to puke, but there’s nothing in his stomach except a little sour bile and he tastes it across his tongue, acid and revolting. Oh god.

There’s a mushroom flowering in the middle of his palm, slick, moist and vaguely coloured like his blood with little white frills underneath, and that is when Tavros truly, finally gives up.


End file.
